And so Firefox continues its march into Europe. It is no secret that alternative browsers are much more popular in Europe than they are in North America, and recent statistics by StatCounter confirm that Firefox 3.0 has actually surpassed Internet Explorer 7, making it the most popular browser in Europe.

... and that's the thing - REALLY there is NO good reason NOT to be able to support all of them, IE6 and newer with minimal effort, apart from the fact that nobody has been coding web pages CORRECTLY the past decade. Tables for layout, non-semantic markup, presentation in the markup, lack of understanding the box model, over-reliance on content sizes, lack of testing...

Worst part is, 90% of the books on shelves are complete outdated trash, and don't even get me STARTED on the education aspect of web development.

Like most other statistics you are going to see people trying to use it to justify taking sleazeball shortcuts that will do nothing but cost them in the long run... remember at the end of the day the numbers may be real, but you can spin them to say anything through omission...

Take the headline itself "FF outpaces IE7" people aren't going to pay much attention to the 7 part and assume you mean IE as a whole...

Which is funny since if you look down the graph you'll notice that IE8 went up the exact same amount 7 went down... So IE7+IE8 is still greater than FF3. Wait, the number of IE7 users dipped when IE8 was released? Who'd have thunk it?